


somewhere-bound

by phollie



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 07:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6745021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phollie/pseuds/phollie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neku’s hands move on their own, find Beat’s in the darkness and hold them tight. Is this how Shiki would have done it? Showing kindness? Neku thinks so - he doesn’t have much else to go by. (He doesn’t think about Joshua. The pain is still too fresh, a half-healed wound whose stitches unseal themselves at every turn.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	somewhere-bound

**somewhere-bound**

+

 _you can use my ribcage as a pillow,  
_ _it doesn’t suit me._

\- [sugar pill // the japanese house](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DpIXqKIgT9p0&t=MDg3OTdmMGY2YjQ5YjdkMjdjOGQyYmYxYTczMGE0NjFiMzBlZmRmYyx0ZGR3SlQ0eA%3D%3D)

+

“I mean, of course I love her.”

Shiki’s legs are swinging from her perch atop the half-wall, palms pressed to cool stone. From his spot beside her, Neku is ever mindful of keeping their shoulders from grazing, his eyes watching the pendulum-sway of Shiki’s sneakers until he’s dizzy from it.  

“What else would it be?” Shiki laughs out, looking at Neku for a blink before turning her eyes down to her lap. “Just one look at me and you can tell. These aren’t even _my_ legs I’m swinging.”

Midnight street lights flit across Shiki’s face – Eri’s face, Neku supposes, but it’s hard to parse that knowledge when this is the only Shiki he’s known these last six days. He squints at the button slope of her nose, the dimple at the corner of her proud mouth. Spheres of colored light from blinking shop windows and billboards make her look like something behind the lens of a kaleidoscope, flashing and swirling and electric, yet still Shiki she remains. Neku shakes his head and looks out at the street again, bustling and humming with people even at this late hour. “Nah,” he says. “There’s more to it than that, I think.”

Shiki’s face tightens with frustration. “What, are you saying I don’t really love her?”

“I’m not saying that.” Neku tucks his legs beneath him and stares out at Hachiko, whose stony eyes watch him with a silent judgment that makes him look elsewhere – two girls a few paces away, standing very close to one another and almost touching hands. The way they talk with heads bowed and eyes glowing, it’s as if they’re whispering every secret they’ve ever collected in their whole lives. Neku keeps his eyes on them when he mutters, “I’m saying…I don’t know. Forget I butted in at all.”

“No.” Shiki’s staring at him now, the lights making her eyes huge and golden. “I wanna hear what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not good at love stuff. Just forget it, really.”

But Shiki’s eyes keep staring, staring and glowing, and Neku knows she’ll keep at it for ages if he doesn’t cough up some words quick. Groaning, he rubs at his tired eyes and makes an honest attempt. “I’m saying, like…you loved her before all this happened, right? Before you wound up here with her body?” Neku struggles for more words, then plucks them up from a foggy corner of his mind never visited before. “I think you’re selling yourself short to just assume this all comes from the body thing. That’s all. I don’t know.”

Shiki looks down at her lap and gives a solemn nod. But in an instance of sudden panic, she lifts her head again and shakes it rapidly, eyes wide and hands waving as if to scrub the air clean of confessions. “But there’s nothing weird about that! Girls always think other girls are pretty, it doesn’t have to mean anything huge.”

“And what’s something huge?”

“The _love_ love. Being _in_ love. It doesn’t have to mean that…”

Neku keeps watching lights swirl their neon trails over Shiki’s nervous hands. He doesn’t need to say a word before she understands his silence and speaks up again. “At least,” she murmurs, “that’s what I’ve always heard from people before…I’ve tried not to think about it too much.”

Neku shrugs. “We’re talking about it now, aren’t we? Seems a good time as any to be thinking about it.” The two girls across the plaza touch fingertips. They do it carefully, privately, so no one sees a moment of closeness in this city that never stops moving. “Plus, you’re the one who brought it up.”

Shiki gives a tiny hum, looking down at her lap again. Then, quietly, she asks, “Have you ever been _in_ love with someone before, Neku? A girl?“ A pause. "Or maybe a boy?”

The two girls link pinky fingers. One of them laughs and covers her mouth to hide it, but Neku sees it in her eyes, sees how the other girl smiles at her like everything makes sense in that one microcosm of a moment. Neku’s only looked at wall murals like that before. Bright slashes of graffiti have made his heart pound, but never a person, never in the way he bets it’s like for Shiki when she talks about Eri.

“Sorry,” Shiki says quickly. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Neku watches the two girls walk away, two more fingers linked between them now. He thinks of tethers, lifelines, lifeboats. He thinks of drowning. Something scared and bitter curls in his stomach that he pushes down with a swallow. “Anyway, we were talking about you, not me. Let’s keep it that way.”

Shiki doesn’t respond for a while. Neku sees the line of her gaze find the two girls – lovers? - and the planes of her face soften into a sweet sort of shock, and then a nostalgic sadness. “It would’ve been nice to have figured this all out,” she says, “back when I was alive.”

It’s the last thing Neku hears before the lights of the city switch off, and then the two are plunged into a sleep so sudden his eyes don’t have time to close before he’s awake in the Scramble again. Shiki’s face looks lighter, calmer. Sunlight reflects in her eyes as two girls pass by with their hands in the pocket of each other’s jacket.

 _Must be nice_ _,_ Neku thinks, and the thought is so jarring he wishes the word “love” could be erased from his memory just like the rest of him was.

+

Joshua smells like soap and linden blossoms and black coffee. Neku only knows this because, in just the day and a half of knowing him, he keeps _standing so close._

“You’re a quiet one,” Joshua says, all smiles. “Not big on opening up, are you?”

Neku keeps his gaze fixed firmly to the mural straight ahead of him. He’s counting how many colors CAT splashed on the wall here: 1, 2, 3, 4, don’t look at Joshua.

“ _Or_ eye contact,” Joshua adds. “You know, a lack of eye contact signifies low self-esteem. But too much of it, an ego the size of Shibuya.”

Neku snorts, unsmiling. “Must explain your constant staring.”

“Oh, no. That’s something else entirely.”

5, 6, 7. Now count the shapes. 1, 2, 3, don’t look at Joshua, 4, 5, 6. He wishes the sun was up so he could see the shapes in the graffiti more clearly, but it’s 11:45 at night, and so he has to go by the light of streetlamps and hung lanterns to make out the art that helps him breathe when everything else feels too close, too cloying. (Like Joshua. Don’t look at him. Don’t think about the pale curl of his hair and how it bounces against his throat when he lets out one of his annoying birdsong laughs. Don’t give him any excuse to stand closer, so close Neku can smell his shampoo.)

“Neku,” Joshua says, circling around Neku’s back, “you should look up instead of out. That mural isn’t going anywhere.”

“I’m not _making_ you stand here with me,” Neku mutters. “If you’re bored then go somewhere else.”

“And leave my partner behind? A cardinal sin.” Joshua is at Neku’s left now, hovering there like something immaterial. If it weren’t for the incessant breath on his neck, he’d almost believe Joshua wasn’t real at all; he isn’t sure if that’d be better or worse than the alternative. “And who said I was bored? I enjoy watching you.”

“Then would it kill you to watch me from a bit further away?”

“How cruel. Death jokes in the middle of our current situation.”

Neku scowls. “I didn’t know you were sensitive about it.”

“Oh, I’m not,” Joshua sighs out, touching at his pale curls with a flippant hand. “And to answer your question, yes. It _would_ kill me, Neku, to not have my eyes on you.”

Neku’s hands clench into fists in his pockets. A flush of heat along his neck seems to bloom with every aimless trace of Joshua’s eyes.

“How easily you forget,” Joshua says, susurrous and very, very close, “that you and I need each other. I wouldn’t be here if not for you.”

Neku offers a wary sideways glance, only to find Joshua standing so close he can make out two rings of silver around his dilated pupils, shimmering and pale amidst the violet that surrounds them. The heat along Neku’s skin wraps around his throat like a hand going for the choke, hot red fingers invisible but burning along his pulse. The lanterns overhead make Joshua glow in strange purples that shine on his face like electric bruises.

Neku swallows around his nerves before speaking. “What do you mean you wouldn’t be here if-”

“One moment.” Joshua holds up a finger, a single punctuation mark to the sentence Neku didn’t get to finish. Then, leaning all the closer, he says, “You have a stray eyelash. Hold very still.”

And for whatever reason, Neku does, turns as still as a salt pillar beneath the slow reach of Joshua’s hand. He stares at those lantern-lit bruises shifting and melding upon Joshua’s skin like living things as a single brush of a thumb touches away the eyelash.

“There we go,” Joshua says. “Didn’t hurt at all, did it?”

A cold feeling curls in Neku’s stomach, but it’s far away, unreachable. Joshua keeps the pad of his thumb pressed to Neku’s forehead. (Right between the eyes. Sleep comes quick.)

+

“I’m tellin’ you,” Beat chokes out, wiping a snail trail of snot onto his sleeve, “don’t ever trust no one who tells you it ain’t cool to cry.”

Neku stays silent. He’s too tired to cry, but luckily Beat is crying hard enough for the both of them, and so he guesses it works out alright. He wonders if he should touch him. It’d be customary, a nice thing to do for someone in pain. His fingers consider the gesture in his lap, tapping almost nervously atop his bent knees. But something holds him back.

They’re huddled together beneath Miyashita Underpass, backs pressed against the epitaphs of sloppy graffiti tagged by so many hands. With how closely they sit together, Neku can feel Beat’s shoulder jump and shake with every sob, which jostles him, but he doesn’t move away; there’s a vague feeling in his chest that any space put between them would be cold and wrong, and so he stays firmly knitted against the boy’s side, staring at his hands and wondering how to make them work.

“Don’t trust no one who says that crap,” Beat repeats with a hard sniff. “Bad people to be hangin’ around. Speakin’ from experience.”

Neku lets himself lean into Beat’s side. It’s warm here, pressed up against him like this, nice and familiar and safe. But it’s nighttime again - it always seems to be nighttime lately, the sun a fake yellow ball even when it’s high noon - and the dark underpass is only lit up with the headlights of passing cars. Neku feels how Beat tenses up when he hears the engines revving past them.

“Rhyme never said a word when I’d start bawlin’,” Beat says, his chin atop his bent knees and bright eyes peering out onto the night. His shoulders jump when he gives a hard sniff. Neku remains pressed steadfastly against him. “Never judged me for a second. You wanna know what she’d do?”

Neku expects Beat to continue without prompting, but when Beat looks at him after a few silent seconds for validation to go on, Neku gives an assuring nod as his cue.

“She’d take me out for walks. Bring me to all her favorite places. One time - one time she took me to this festival thing I didn’t even know was goin’ on. Full of lanterns and stuff. Hung ‘em from building to building all across the streets, it was cool. It was real cool.”

Neku remembers the purple light melting across Joshua’s face. He leans a little harder into Beat’s side, feeling cold.

“We had to pass through here to get there,” Beat says, his voice suddenly small. When Neku follows the trail of the other’s gaze, he finds it settled on the scrappy memorial a few meters away. The candles aren’t lit; when Neku squints, he sees a picture frame capsized, a can of soda stolen from its usual spot amidst these offerings to the dead. He hopes Beat doesn’t notice, but he feels him shaking and knows better than to assume he wouldn’t sense something amiss in his own memorial.

“It’s bullshit,” Beat says between gritted teeth in a moment’s sudden fury. He jams his forehead against his knee and makes a horrible sound, something between a groan and a sob, a sound more animal than teenager. “Everything I do, I just go and mess it up till there’s no fixin’ it. I got Rhyme killed _twice_ \- I - can’t do nothin’ right ever, _ever_ -”

Neku’s hands move on their own, find Beat’s in the darkness and hold them tight. Is this how Shiki would have done it? Showing kindness? Neku thinks so - he doesn’t have much else to go by. (He doesn’t think about Joshua. The pain is still too fresh, a half-healed wound whose stitches unseal themselves at every turn.)  But it feels different. There’s a thrumming in Neku’s fingertips which stems from his heart, warm and anxious, wanting to help, wanting to reach and hold and carry.

Beat lifts his head and turns to look at Neku, and when a passing car’s headlights flash over his face, Neku sees his cheeks streaked with tears, his eyes so blue they look painted. The lights pass and shadows fall over the both of them again, but still Beat stares at him with a question mark hovering around his mouth and in his gaze. He doesn’t take his hands away. Neku’s stomach flips with something like hope when he feels Beat hold his hands in return, squeezing them until it almost aches.

“I think-” Neku stares at Beat’s hands instead of his eyes. “I think you’re good at a lot of things, Beat.”

The words are clunky in his mouth, but they come out one way or another, offered before Beat the way he imagines flowers are set down with shaking hands at his memorial. Another car passes, lights him up in all gold and glaring white; Neku feels his hands being squeezed for one scared moment of remembrance.

“Man, you’re gettin’ all…” Beat’s eyes flit off to the left. “All sappy on me and stuff…didn’t think you were the type.”

Neku gives a shrug that tries not to look bashful. “Me neither. Is it bad?”

“No,” Beat says right away, his voice high and winded. “No, it ain’t bad. Not one bit.”

“Alright. Then I’ll keep going.” Neku keeps his eyes trained on their hands clasped around each other’s, white-knuckled and desperate for closeness. “Maybe I’m a little jealous at how you feel things,” he mumbles.

“What d'you mean?” Beat’s voice is softly anxious now, almost defensive but too tired for it. “How do I feel things?”

“Honestly. Candidly.” Neku grips the boy’s hands and bows his head. “Like you said. Never ashamed of what you’re feeling. You let it out.”

Beat manages a half-laugh, just a loose breath. “Course I let it out. What else would I do?”

“What I do.”

Neku doesn’t need to elaborate for Beat to get it. He can tell by the way the grip on his hands loosens in a moment’s surprise before there’s another warm squeeze as Beat mirrors the bowing of Neku’s head. “I think you’re feelin’ things right now,” Beat says on a shy mumble. “I mean - I _think_ so, at least, but I could be wrong, I dunno…”

Neku lifts his head. His heart thumps hard in his ears. It’s either Beat’s hands or his own that are starting to sweat, or both, but he can’t tell what with how tightly stitched together they are. Beat’s shoulders rise and fall with shaky breaths. There’s something hopeful and wanting in his eyes, something a little confused even as it aches for an answer. Neku’s embarrassment would make him look away were it not for the harrowing thought that this could never happen again.

He thinks about moving in. And then he does, the movement slow and clumsy but finding its course halfway there to the quivering line of Beat’s mouth. Beat makes a foolish sound but it’s wonderfully honest, and his hands are reckless things as they tremble their way to Neku’s shoulders to hold onto as if he’ll drift back up to the land of the living if he doesn’t grab hold of him fast enough. Neku’s head is spinning, brain swimming, fingers touching Beat’s inner wrists to feel an echo of a pulse there beneath the skin. His body gives off heat. Like this, in this nest of warmth and feeling, it’s almost easy to forget they’re both dead.

Beat breaks the kiss with a curse, bowing his head to rest his forehead against Neku’s chest. “Dammit,” he grinds out between his teeth. “Dammit, dammit, it’s almost here-”

“What is it?” Fear rises like a familiar friend in Neku’s throat. “What’s almost here?”

“The sleeping,” Beat says with a panicked shake of his head. “I can - I can feel it when it’s comin’ on, when they make us go to sleep and we don’t remember when-”

Neku’s stomach sinks down hard. Another car is coming, its headlights huge and white like the eyes of God. _But I don’t wanna sleep,_ he thinks, feverish and flushed and full of dread. _I wanna stay right here._

Beat grabs his hands and holds them tight. His tears drip hot onto Neku’s wrists. “Don’t let go, man,” he chokes out. “Please.”

Neku stares at the lowered crown of Beat’s head. He’s right - things are starting to feel foggy and unfocused around their edges, too bright like an overexposed photograph. The headlights are coming. Is it the Composer who puts them to sleep? Who is it that takes his body from him again and again?

“Don’t let go,” Beat says as he huddles close.

“I won’t,” Neku says, gripping the other’s hands against the tolling bell of his heart. “I won’t let go. Not for a second.”

When the headlights pass and the darkness comes, they go out with it together.


End file.
